How we built our decentralised team
An overview of the Linum Labs’ journey as a decentralised team working in blockchain — from how we initially started out, then shifted focus and scaled, all while maintaining our kick-ass company culture and operating with remote-first principles.
Starting out
Back in the early days of the company, with our roots in Cape Town, South Africa, Paul Kohlhaas and I began our journey with Linum by providing blockchain training and solutions to large corporations as the initial business model.
As a startup, we were the epitome of staying lean: providing training was an ideal way for us to curb overhead costs and stay cash flow positive from the get-go. After a few months of this, it was time to expand the team with our first hire: marketing.
The first hire
It was a big step for us, making the first hire. This was the first person that we shared our culture with, taught our ways to, and ultimately grew alongside as the company expanded. It was also the first time that we had to start expanding our communication structures and putting processes in place that were more formal than a Whatsapp chat.
It was a bit of a whirlwind with our first hire, and it set the precedent for all of our hires moving forward. After selecting the best candidate, and only 3 days of on-boarding, I had to leave for Berlin for 3 months. Our new team member had no choice but to figure it all out, remotely and quickly. It was a “hit the ground running” situation.
What we’ve found through this “placed into the deep end” technique is that when given the right direction and resources, team members that have the right mindset, drive and skills are able to run with deliverables independently and proactively.
Growing from 3 to 13
Our team grew slowly over the next few months as we took extra care and effort in crafting a team of passionate, kind and entrepreneurial individuals. It always blows my mind at how much can be accomplished by a smaller team full of ambition and belief in what they’re doing.
With a team of only 5 at the time — we pulled off Africa’s (then) largest blockchain hackathon, Unlock the Block, in partnership with UCT’s AIFMRM. After that, we started seeing what else we could do to push our boundaries as we grew together as a team. Each member added value above and beyond their initial deliverables with a fierce determination and diligence in how they carried themselves.
The hires that didn’t go well
On the odd occasion, we have hired a team member where it didn’t work out. This was often due to a combination of being unable to adapt to remote working policies and the absence of defined structures put in place to help them figure it out. Even after amazing interviews, a great CV, awesome character assessments and good intentions — remote work doesn’t work for everyone, and that’s okay. To try and mitigate this, we have a standard 3 month probationary period for all new hires.
Building the culture
The people in our team have formed the basis of our culture. Growing our company culture started with our very first hire. Our original team members were the ones that grew our vision, especially as we started scaling. How we communicated and treated one another set the precedent for the rest of our team going forward. In a remote team, it’s even more important because these were the people we needed to trust with doing day to day work without actually ever seeing them do it.
Beyond general bad-assed-ness, fast learning, insane competence and being helluva smart, we ensure that the people we hire are people that we would also get along with. This means looking out for traits that we value such as entrepreneurship, that ‘go-getter’ mindset, kindness, compassion, empathy, excitement and ambition. We want to expand our team with people who want to change the world and actually believe that they can do so.
This has formed the basis of how we hire. As a result, it’s always only ever been a HELL YES or a no. There’s no in between. As a small team, we can’t afford to play around like that.
Remaining dynamic and ahead of the curve
Our company is built on 3 core pillars, community, knowledge and development. We spent the first two and a half years focusing on building the blockchain community in South Africa. Now, we are proud to say that we have built that community to over 19,000 people globally, across 11 African countries as well as in Berlin and Switzerland.
Our initial focus on growing the community and its knowledge base enabled us to find skilled developers, passionate about what we wanted to achieve and ultimately contributed toward achieving the goal of our 3rd core company value, development.
As a result, last year at a team offsite in Bali, we made the decision to put less of a focus on training and consulting, and instead focus on contributing back to the ecosystem through creating and building decentralised solutions with our bad-ass developer team.
Our products
Time to BUIDL! We are currently working on projects that we believe may help make a positive impact on the world. We want to lead the way to healthier societies by using blockchain technology to enable a new frictionless and distributed economy with inclusion for all. Some of these products have already been in the works for years.
In October 2016, Protea, originally “The Meetup Token”, started as a social experiment using behavioural economics to incentivise actions within various Meetup communities. This led to a way for us to quantify the value of a community and help communities to grow their value.
The next product came along in late 2017, Molecule, a software platform to accelerate innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. The protocol connects scientists, patients, and industry to advance drug development in a collaborative open market. We strongly believe this could lead to the next evolution in drug development innovation.
“Focusing on the interdependence of health and identity, with a people-centric approach, we aim to unlock new opportunities and improve upon existing systems by building blockchain solutions that will accelerate change and have a real-world impact.”
Where we’re at now
Today, we are a team of 21 diverse individuals and still hiring. We’ve since set up an HQ in Basel, Switzerland to be closer to the city’s prominent pharmaceutical hub and start expanding the local blockchain community there. We have also opened an official office space in Cape Town and plan on launching our Berlin office in August to provide a space for our team to get together and work from a central hub when they need to.
From here on out, we will continue to grow together as a team and expand on our vision, building the products that we love for the causes that we believe in.
Thanks for reading! I will be releasing a follow on from this article in the coming weeks on a few of the company practices that have enabled us to work so well as a remote team. Keep an eye out for our take on the Presence-based vs Output-based workflow system. If you have any feedback or questions, please leave a comment below.
- P.S.: In case you missed it — our latest full team get-together was in South Africa a few weeks back for ETHCapeTown, an international hackathon with a focus on building real-world applications aimed at solving the continents biggest challenges, that we put together with the EthGlobal team — you can read more about it here.
